Omega Workshops

The Omega Workshops were an English applied-arts company founded in 1913 by the painter and critic Roger Fry and located in London on Fitzroy Square. The enterprise was closely bound up with the Bloomsbury circle and aimed to unite fine and decorative art, giving modernist artists a means of earning a living by decorating interiors and creating household objects. Its leading members, besides Fry himself, were the painters Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. The workshops produced painted furniture, ceramics, textiles, carpets, stained glass and whole decorative ensembles marked by bright colour, simplified forms and the influence of Post-Impressionism, Fauvism and the European avant-garde, which Fry had introduced to the British public through his landmark exhibitions. One of Omega's guiding principles was anonymity: the products were not signed with the names of individual makers but marked only with the Greek letter omega, emphasising the collective rather than individual character of the work. The enterprise was short-lived and closed in 1919 owing to financial difficulties, partly caused by the First World War, yet it had a notable influence on the development of British modernist design.